Scanning white-light interferometry is an important measurement option for many surfaces. However, serious profile measurement errors can be present when measuring free-form surfaces being highly curved or tilted. When the object surface slope is not zero, the object and reference rays are no longer common path and optical aberrations impact the measurement. Aberrations mainly occur at the beam splitter in the interference objective and from misalignment in the optical system. Both effects distort the white-light interference signal when the surface slope is not zero. In this paper, we describe a modified version of white-light interferometry for eliminating these measurement errors and improving the accuracy of white-light interferometry. Moreover, we report systematic errors that are caused by optical aberrations when the object is not flat, and compare our proposed method with the conventional processing algorithm using the random ball test.
